Helen Edwards Receives 2003 Robert R. Wilson Prize from the American Physical Society

by Mike Perricone

Helen
Edwards, whose work in the early days of Fermilab is a foundation of
past, present and future scientific achievements, and whose current work is
helping shape the next generation of particle accelerators, has been awarded
the 2003 Robert R. Wilson Prize by the American Physical Society.

The award is named for Fermilab's founding director, Robert Rathbun Wilson
(1914-2000), and was established in 1986 by friends of Wilson, and by the
Division of Particles and Fields and the Division of Physics of Beams of the
American Physical Society. Previous winners include Cornell University’s
Maury Tigner (2000) and Fermilab’s Alvin Tollestrup (1989).

“It is a great honor to receive the Wilson Prize,” said Edwards, who with her
husband, Don, worked with Wilson first at Cornell University and then at the
National Accelerator Laboratory, later renamed Fermilab.

The 2003 award cites Edwards “for her pivotal
achievement and critical contribution as the leader in
the design, construction, commissioning and operation
of the Tevatron, and for her continued contributions to
the development of high gradient superconducting
linear accelerators as well as bright and intense
electron sources.” The award will be presented in
April 2003 at the APS annual meeting.

“I was delighted to learn that Helen Edwards had been
awarded the Wilson Prize,” said Fermilab Director
Michael Witherell.“Bob Wilson brought Helen to work
at Fermilab, and both of them made essential contributions to the remarkable
success of Fermilab and its accelerators. I’m very pleased that Helen’s work
has been recognized in this way.”

In a distinguished and much-heralded career, Edwards has been the
recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Medal of Technology,
and the Department of Energy’s E.O. Lawrence Award. She is a member
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy
of Engineering, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Edwards said she regards herself as part of a permanent team with her
husband, Fermilab physicist Don Edwards, with Wilson holding a special
place as their team leader.

“My husband, Don, and I worked under Bob Wilson’s direction for over
20 years and we benefited greatly from his example,” Edwards said.
“I believe this award is for my husband as much as for myself, as we have
worked effectively as a team over the years. I have grown to appreciate
Wilson’s leadership and convictions more and more over the years. Not only
was he a great technical leader but he communicated his beliefs with great
clarity. He lauded international collaboration and decried ‘creeping
bureaucracy.’”

She continued: “I can do no better than to excerpt some of his thoughts from
his 1969 testimony before Congress, on building the Fermilab accelerator:
‘…(T)his new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has
nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth
defending.’”

The Tevatron accelerated its first beam in 1983,
recorded its first proton-antiproton collisions in
1985, and provided the pathway for discovering the
top quark in 1995. It has been named a national
landmark by the American Society of Mechanical
Engineers, for its pioneering use of more than
1,000 superconducting magnets. Still the world’s
highest-energy particle collider, the Tevatron has
the Higgs boson among its targets for Collider
Run II.

“To begin with, there was indeed a good bit of
skepticism over whether [the Tevatron] would
work,” she recalled.“By the time we were ready to
turn it on, I was pretty confident that it would work,
and work well. I think that had to do with the many
iterations of testing things, installing, re-installing
and getting all the engineering to work. It began as
a fixed-target machine, of course, then two years
later joined up with the Pbar Source to run as a
collider. So there were two major steps involved.”

Edwards is conducting research in superconducting
technology for one of the possible designs of an
electron-positron linear collider, proposed as the
next machine for the field of high-energy physics.
She has been the leader of the Photoinjector
Project, which used a superconducting radio-
frequency cavity for the first time at Fermilab to
accelerate an electron beam. The photoinjector
is now the key element in the NICADD (Northern
Illinois Center for Accelerator and Detector
Development) collaboration between Fermilab
and Northern Illinois University.

Edwards also shuttles between Fermilab and
Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY)in
Hamburg, Germany working on research and
development for the TESLA superconducting linear
collider. Don Edwards, who also works on the
photoinjector project, edited the technical design
report for DESY’s TESLA Test Facility in 1994.
Helen Edwards is adamant about the goal of
building a linear collider as an international
laboratory.

“Either we’ll build it as an international laboratory,”
she said,“or we’ll have nothing."